I just realized something. LG is the first OEM to use on-screen buttons without wasted bezels above and below the screen. I mean that all phones that have been released with on-screen buttons have had relatively thick bezels either above or below the display. But with G3, the bezel below the screen is thick, yes, but the glass portion of the bezel is quite thin. This means that there is possibilty that we now have the technology to create a HTC M8 like phone but with thin bezels above and below the screen (the glass part of the bezels). This means that we can finally have smaller phones with good front facing speakers.Reply

I didn't mind the fact that front facing speakers require space. I did however mind that the extra space (occupied by speakers) was in addition to the already thick bottom bezels (think the glass portion of HTC M8's bottom bezel, where the HTC logo resides). I think we can finally get rid of that useless space.Reply

Moto X and G2 both had relatively thin bezels, even top/bottom ones, certainly compared to something like the very tall HTC One (any of 'em)... Those two phones kinda convinced me on screen buttons was the way to go, you just end up making much better use of the space available. Much more so than the overall bezel space, they were not larger than phones with capacitive buttons while having larger screens, that was the crucial point for me. Up to that point phones with on screen buttons were just larger than an equivalent phone with a similar size and dedicated buttons.Reply

Samsung managed to find a way to violate my preference for function over form with their "band-aid on a hub cap" design aesthetic. This is the first device I've ever seen where I don't really care how good the rest of it is. I've also learned by installing Cyanogenmod on my S3 that Touchwiz is solely responsible for its hiccupy UI and tendency to crash.

HTC's camera is just unacceptable. I understand that megapixels aren't everything but they aren't exactly nothing either. I will occasionally print a photo for hanging on the wall. Suppose I want to print an 8x10. A typical photo printer will output at 300dpi. That means to avoid pixelation in the print I need a camera whose resolution is: (8 in)x (300 dots/in) x (10 in) x (300 dots/in) = 7.2 MP. So an 8 MP shooter is the minimum acceptable for anything beyond Instagram, and even that allows no real room for any zoom.

Sony has a high resolution camera that seems to be pretty good, but has coupled that with 16 MB internal storage. That doesn't leave much memory for photos or for anything else. There's also no real guarantee it ever shows up in the US.

It baffles me why manufacturers want to cut these weird corners. No way it saves them more than $5 or $10 per phone. Do they really think anyone who would buy a $600 phone would run away from a $605 one?Reply

Yeah, 538ppi seems way overkill. I get that there are benefits beyond the 300PPI marketed as "retina", but going *so* high seems like you're just wasting GPU power pushing pixels you can't even notice. Reply

Seems like a huge waste of GPU power for something that doesn't yield big enough returns over 300-400 PPI displays. Android is also laggy enough as it is, the hardware doesn't need to make things worse by being so demanding.

Agreed Adroid is laggy enough on its own, and mobile GPU's aren't strong enough to drive these resolutions as it is. I mean if it was Windows 8.1 phone I could see its UI is buttery smooth it could probably get away with driving that resolution.Reply

Oh yes... Android lags a lot. Does that happen in your fanboy dreams or in 2009? Because I have a Nexus 4 which is brutally responsive, and it could be considered an average phone right now. Even my iOS friends got surprised of how snappy the phone is. Can't even imagine a muuuuch faster G3.Reply

Yeah, sorry, Android still lags somewhat in certain tasks. Of course, when people say lag they mean different things. For instance, one form of lag which definitely exists is that the movement of the screen is slightly behind the fingers' movement. The second sometimes is when the system gets bogged down, the phone becomes unresponsive. I noticed both in my Nexus 5. They don't happen often, but they are there. Also, that's not to say iOS is perfectly smooth as my ipad 3 drops frames when you drag the search bar down. But I haven't encountered an unresponsive system yet. When an app freezes or something in iOS, you can press the home button to exit. In Android, sometimes the system freezes.Reply

I noticed the Moto X is better than a lot of flagships in this respect, but it rarely gets mentioned. Though I also find the Nexus 5 much improved too, so maybe you're more sensitive to touch lag. The HTC One M8 actually has a faster touchscreen response time than the iPhone 5S, as does the Note 3. Reply

I've got both the Note 3 and 5s. The N3 is definitely the fastest Android device I've owned, but the 5s is quicker, more fluent and definitely has a 'faster touchscreen response time'. Not that I don't love em both, but that's simply not true. One can easily disable parallax (which is by design not representative of 'delay' as seen by turning it 'off')Reply

Can't say I've noticed screen responsiveness lagging on my Nexus 5, it'll get unresponsive once in a blue moon but that's usually when I've got over 100 tabs open in Chrome and I switch over to something else quickly, and even then it handles that better than many PCs (when you go over 99 tabs on Android Chrome the button changes from a # to a happy face btw). Frankly I continue to be amazed by it, feels so much better than any of the three HTCs I had before (not blaming Sense, there were aspects of it I liked, I'm sure it was the congealment of Android improvements, hardware, etc).Reply

Agreed over a short period of time users will begin to notice that android lag that plagues all their devices.This res would do well on the WP8.1 platform throughout its lifetime.I don't know what it is, Windows just seems to have gotten their OS to run super efficient.Reply

I really can't get past the back buttons. I tried so hard with the G2. The knock feature doesn't work when you want it to and happens randomly sometimes. I really need the side buttons. The IR blaster on the G2 had terrible range, I hope they fixed it for the G3.Reply

Knock on is one of those features that once you get used to it, you'll never be able to live without it... and it works perfectly for me. That would be why HTC implemented it, and Samsung will no doubt.Reply

^ Agreed. I occasionally find myself tapping my tablet trying to get it to turn on. Also the latest update (to 4.4.2) made Knock On a lot more reliable for me. There was an issue with the sensitivity of the light sensor prior to that. To each their own but the back buttons didn't take much effort to get used to for me.Reply

My knockon is flawless. I just do 3 quick taps (ba ba ba), every time. The IR blaster range was fine. I am able to sit on my couch and shoot the TV (55" that is pretty far away). I never use the back buttons. Honestly I forget they are back there. The Stock software on the G2 (and G3) is very intuitive and displays volume controls in the drop down notification shade whenever there is audio playing. Coupled with the Floating Text and Phone app notifications.

I am currently loving my G2 and the G3 would be a sweet addition. Personally 5.5" is just too big. The 5.2" screen already walks on my comfort line for 1 hand used. And the extra bump in resolution doesn't phase me. At 480 DPI, the G2 is just fine.Reply

Well, it's more secure now (might've been a hurdle for some enterprise certification/adoption?), and it's also one of the few things they could still do to differentiate. I wouldn't read that much into it tbh, the majority of people still don't care and those that do just have more choices now, yay.Reply

Capacity is right up there with any other current flagship tho, Samsung's batteries look the same... It's not like you can build it up into the camera... It'd be interesting if now that everyone's going removable again someone came out with a model that had a sealed 4000mAh battery, ball is in your court Moto! Moto were the ones that started the trend towards significantly larger battery capacities anyway...Reply

Larger? They made the screen larger? Really? It's already borderline too big, I have the G2 and I love the phone but I do wish it was slightly smaller. 5" would probably be perfect. That being said I'm 6'4" with hands that can one-hand a basketball. So if I'm saying this I simply cannot IMAGINE the market this phone is designed for... NBA giants exclusively?

Haven't gotten to the rest of the review yet, just reading that puts it out of my zone of interest. Hopefully they release one that is the exact same, in every single way, except 4.5-5".

Though I'd also be fine with it if they dropped the resolution back down to 1080p. Even that is over-kill on a phone, so going beyond what makes sense for a home theatre in a phone is even dumber.

Just noticed this isn't an article, but a 1 page blog. So guess I'm done. Reply

Regarding the LG back buttons: its funny how on older phones groping for the little power button sliver on a side or bottom along a phone is a norm and takes a bit of adoption to get it right in the pocket, on a table etc. The G2's back buttons make that so easy and natural especially when makeing minute volume adjustments during calls. Once you go to the LG's back button layout, for such a simple change, is very effective. Reply

I have pretty good (better than 20/20) vision and I have to use a magnifying glass to see any kind of pixelation on my Nexus 5's 1080p screen. Even with the magnifying glass the pixels are *REALLY* hard to make out, unless there's a high contrast edge without AA being applied, and KitKat seems to add AA to everything because the whole UI is rendered in 3D.

2560x1440 is just a waste of battery, requires a brighter backlight to deliver the same visible screen brightness and increases the cost of the phone for no sensible benefit. The Adreno330 is clocked 27% faster, but the resolution is 78% higher, meaning that this phone will be SLOWER at native resolutions than its predecessors.